Solid. Gold.

Oh wasn't that so clever it just made y'head spin.

K. D'afternoon and happy October to y' and y'rs. My head is currently hazier than a bayou in the deepest part of the deep south. Bayou. Fun word. Does anyone remember that movie "Eve's Bayou"? No? Well it's a good thing I do! It was about a black family in 1960's Louisiana that was headed by a philandering father and the effects that his adulterous ways had on his young, idealistic, protagonist-daughter, Eve.

It ended with a gargantuan bareback orgy-turned-murder-suicide. No. It didn't. It wasn't nearly that eventful. I watched it one overcast afternoon on Cinemax back in the bad old days when I was living in Brockville.

WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW???!!! BLAST! I'm making no sense whatsoever.

I just got back from an audition for Futureshop - you know one of those quirky, Dudely Duderson types? The breakdown said "very average looking comedic performer" a-la Seth Rogan/Paul Rudd. I e-mailed me agent back and was like "Really? Really? Wow. Is this what it's come to?"

Apparently - it has. Anyway - the audition saw my 'character' mulling over buying a gift for his girlfriend or giving her a song that he's written instead, that happens to be an 80's power-ballad. So, my Michael Bolton impression came out in full force and stunned all involved. Now my voice is kind of raw and in pain, but it was worth it. I don't know how M-Bo did it all those years. It really took a stripe offa me. And I was just pretending to be Michael Bolton for 5 minutes. He IS Michael Bolton, 24/7/365/80-or-so if he take his vitamins and stays out of harm's way. So golly, is the point.

Anyballs - this weekend was craziness. And the best part is it cost me NOTHING. Friday night was spent at Dance Cave, which I always seem to have an okay time at despite the fact that I'm also so resistant to going. Hmmm. Funny how that works out. Anyway, as the crowd never fails to be straight out of a tickle trunk in terms of their multiformity, there was some dude wearing goth-ified makeup and a mothafuckin' top hat. Naturally, everyone insisted in having their picture taken with him.

Saturday was considerably more interesting. Starting off uneventfully enough - I went shoe-shopping. I bought a pair of white Pumas that look exactly the same as the last pair of white Pumas that I bought. Meh. Then to the gym. - things took a turn for the dramatic on m'way home from the gym.

At St. Clair station - where my gym is - there was a good old fashioned jumper. Yeppers. Someone fucking jumped. As if to say "Not only am I going to end MY own life, but I'm going temporarily inconvenience YOURS in the process. Muahaha". It truly is the most destructive form of suicide. I count subway jumpers right behind belligerent obese people and wayward teenage mothers on my list of "Pirates of my Convenience" on the TTC.

I find out that this is a jumper by politely asking some random mangy girl of Mediterranean heritage who just came up from the station if they had just been evacuated. She gives me a once-over and very snidely goes "... yes." To which I laughed in her face and said "Oooooh... attitude..." It was all I could do to hold my tongue and tell her that if I looked like some gypsy whore straight off the barge, I might not be packin' that attitude, but didna as y'all, them Gypsy's is crazy. They're like starving rabid squirrels - they're just not afraid to die!

No matter... I was super pissed that I needed to walk to Yonge as it's like 5 kms and I just did cardio... and the whole point of me doing cardio is so that I don't fucking need to walk! So this is just counterproductive!!! I took my pissed-off-edness out on an unsuspecting mother out for a stroll with her baby carriage that nicked me in the Achilles' tendon. I looked back at her with an absolutely bone-chilling look of disdain, then turned my head back around and laughed. It was ridiculous. Anyway... I'm extraordinarily long-winded today... what's that all about?

My pissed off-ed-ness was replaced by delicious curiosity when I FINALLY got back home and noticed that it was customer appreciation day at m'local Dairy Queen. Do you know what this meant? HALF-PRICED CAKES. So I went in, just to get the lay of the land, as it were. I was like "Cakes is half-price?" and he's all, "Yep". So I was like, "Oh... I'll have one then!". AND I DID!!! I GOT A WHOLE FUCKING BLIZZARD CAKE. Which I devoured yesterday. It was both incredibly delicious and incredibly shameful... but I'll choose to focus on the positive.

Anyway - Saturday night was important for two reasons: A.) T'was the season premiere of the 33rd season of Saturday Night Live, B.) It was Nuit Blanche... a citywide, high-end installation art-exhibit on the streets of Toronto sponsored by my bank, Scotiabank (pronounced Sco-see-a Bank, of course).

A slew AND I MEAN SLEW of us gathered at Anthony's house in picturesque Clairhurst (that's actually what the neighborhood at Bathurst and St. Clair is called... which is retarded... it's like me calling my neighborhood of Broadview & Danforth something like Broadforth or Danview or Droadfow or Brandviewth or something crazy like that), a gathering made extra-extra special by the presence of none-other than SHEANNA JAMES!!! Freshly back from a prolonged schooling excursion in Australia and back into our hearts! (Pictured to the right w/me and Caswell)

Anyway... SNL was more hit than it was miss - although LeBron James sucked it as much as any athletic figure they for-some-reason get to host, it was positively joyous to see Maya Rudolph back in action. The Penelope sketch made us weak in the knees. The high school musical sketch was hilarious and particularly poignant for one Heidi Brander. That digital short featuring Jake Gyllenhal and Adam Levine of Maroon 5 was glorious. Weekend Update had some sheer brilliance, especially Amy Poehler's "A man in Boston used a crossword puzzle to propose to his fiance. However, this comes 6 months after he used a word jumble to divorce his last wife." That word jumble is pictured to the left, to the left. I figured it would be more effective and less time consuming to just replicate the actual graphic than explain what it looked like, so there.

My personal highlight of the episode, however, was that motherfucking Solid Gold sketch. For those of you who don't know what Solid Gold is/was, I don't blame you. It was before my time, too. But it was fantastic. The best way I could describe it would be to say that it was the "So You Think You Can Dance" of its generation - not in that it was a competition, but that it was a dance show. It was like American Bandstand, or Soul Train, or Hullaballoo or any one of those shows that featured live, lip-sync'd performances by popular artists of the day that went the way of the dodo after the advent of music videos --- except it had a stable of dancers that would execute intricate, pelvis smashing jazz-dance numbers with military execution alongside or behind the artists and most titillating of all, there would be a weekly countdown narrated in movement by the Solid Gold dancers. For some reason, the douche bag who uploaded this clip disabled embedding, so I IMPLORE you to go and watch THIS CLIP of the Solid Gold dancers. And upon watching it, I defy you to not get a boner/lady boner.

A few things of note re: that clip. A.) I'm under the impression, right off the bat, that this show was shot in the 1980's. Just a hunch. B.) If you watched the actual countdown, you'll note that I have every single one of those songs on my iPod right now. Heart, ABC, Starship, oh hells to the yes... C.) How amazing was their routine to Starship's "We Built This City"? Answer: very.

Suffice to say, they became superstars in their own right - much like the So You Think You Can Dance kids did and have. Darcel, Jamillah, Beverley, Elaine, Coolie, Marc, Nicole, Pam. And for some ungodly reason they were big about disclosing their height and weight as evidenced in this almost-surreal clip:

I love it when I can find the exact youtubings that SNL bases their parodies on, and the above two clips were just that. In the sketch, they had an interview portion in which all of the dancers said their names, height and weight and their interests. They ranged from "making vests" to "roasted whole turkeys" to "jazz-walks on the beach". So of course we went apeshit over this, and subsequently jazz-walked and/or jazz-ran everywhere the livelong night. It was like we were the modern day Solid Gold dancers. A point driven all the way home with this promo shot we had taken to commemorate the occasion.

And yes, that is me as Darcel.

That's it for today.

Tomorrow - a recap of our Nuit Blanche, and, corresponding Jour Noir.

--- Aj